WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Mordor
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Escaping the Tower at Hell Difficulty ◈
Episode 114
──────
There wasn't even time to catch my breath.
After returning to the lodging, I made sure no one had followed me before carefully going inside.
There were more people in the house than expected.
"Hm?"
The Orc hunters we'd freed from prison were still here.
Were they planning to latch onto us?
They didn't even have decent equipment anymore.
And after ending up in prison, they were definitely wanted criminals now.
They might have Nightmare Coins, but it was too late for them to use the exit or the shops.
Slightly dumbfounded, I entered the house.
Yuki and Kim Yuna had already returned, along with Han Juwon and Sang Hajun.
"Ah, you're back!"
"There were at least five Night Watchers... I can't believe you shook them off and made it back."
The Orc hunters huddled in the corner, trembling as they spoke.
They had nearly been thrown alive into a furnace. It made sense that they were still shaken.
There was a lot to discuss about that facility.
They tightly gripped makeshift coin pouches in both hands.
We could've taken the coins from them long ago, but even knowing that, they didn't seem able to relax.
"Why haven't you left?"
When I asked, the one who seemed to be their leader stepped forward.
"Because we have nowhere to go... The exit has been closed, and even when it opens, hunters will probably be camped out nearby for a while. By the way, we're late in thanking you. Thank you. Truly."
"... So?"
When exactly were these guys planning to leave?
When I showed a little discomfort, they made a suggestion.
"Why don't we check our haul first?"
"Sure."
I set down the Subspace Backpack weighing on my shoulders, and it was time for a satisfying count.
We bundled the heavy coins in sets of fifty.
There were an enormous number of them, but with so many people, counting didn't take long.
"Team Leader, I have 1,988 coins here."
"I've got a little over 2,200."
Added together, we had around 10,500 coins.
That should be enough to pick up one top-grade artifact before leaving, shouldn't it?
The Orcs had around 8,000 coins.
They'd done well to grab that much in the middle of such chaos.
Hunter experience didn't disappear just because they were in trouble.
Then, at that moment, a familiar presence approached from outside.
I raised the lantern and immediately said, "It's a Night Watcher."
"Ghk, we'll step outside for a bit!"
The Orcs hurried out the window without even taking time to gather their coins.
The Night Watcher checked that there were five of us in front of the Door Plaque, then simply left.
"Whew... It's gone. Come back in."
"Doesn't it recognize who we are?"
"Yeah. What happens to the bounties?"
When I asked the Orcs, they answered right away.
"Bounties? Did a Night Watcher catch you earlier? Did you get within five meters of one or something...?"
"Not exactly. I dealt with everyone who was at the scene."
"Then you don't have a problem. We do."
I hadn't been worried from the start thanks to the Death Priest’s Mask.
Still, Han Juwon was safe too?
That was a relief.
"When does a bounty get cleared, then?"
"... Usually, it doesn't."
Usually.
There were exceptions to almost everything.
"Petty criminals who commit petty theft or mugging do eventually get cleared, but City Hall doesn't remove them. It's more like they get pushed down the list when new wanted criminals show up."
"Ah, so that's how it works."
It was impossible to monitor and place bounties on every hunter who entered.
So it seemed minor criminals were removed from the wanted list after enough time had passed.
"But we got caught robbing a shop, so our bounties won't go away. By now, breaking out of prison has probably been added too..."
"You got caught robbing a shop?"
"Ah, not the City Hall shop! It was just a small store in the northern district."
Breaking out of prison, huh.
They tried to kill them by throwing them into a furnace, and escaping added another charge.
From City Hall's perspective, that was probably natural.
'So a bounty never goes away... This is even harsher than I expected.'
It meant that once you became wanted, normal activity in the city became impossible.
Unless you still had team members who weren't wanted.
They were already playing games with the exits.
The 13th floor really wasn't going to be easy.
"Then what are you going to do?"
I asked, exercising a little empathy.
Some people said that kind of thing wasn't useful for hunter work.
But to predict someone's actions, you needed to understand their motives.
"Well, we talked it over while waiting for you to return..."
"We're going to retire."
"... Retire?"
The answer came so readily that it caught me off guard.
Of course, hunters capable of reaching the 13th floor probably had some financial foundation.
"Our whole team is wanted, so we can't keep operating on the 13th floor. We've also lost all our equipment."
"... Right."
"Honestly, challenging the 14th floor is impossible with our skills and equipment... And it's not like we can go back to the 12th floor to gather longevity mushrooms. Things have gotten brutally dangerous there lately because of the new weapons."
Now that I heard it, their situation did sound hopeless.
They had obtained around 8,000 coins this time.
If they wanted to, they could restore all their equipment.
No, they could probably upgrade it.
The Lizardman hunter team's main equipment had sold for only 400 coins total.
Of course, it had been sold on the Black Market, so they'd been severely underpaid.
Even considering that, a normal loadout of equipment was worth around 3,000 to 4,000 coins.
Still, they seemed to have made up their minds about retirement.
It wasn't often that hunters got their hands on this much money.
And continuing to operate on the 13th floor would be difficult, so walking away was probably a wise choice.
It wasn't like I was responsible for their lives.
Telling them what to do from here on out would be inappropriate too.
Still, I was curious.
How did retired hunters live?
Every hunter I'd met until now had still been active.
"What are you planning to do after retiring?"
"We have a ranch back home. It originally belonged to our family... We'll buy it back and raise livestock."
"Ah... really? That's nice. Good luck with it. Send us some meat sometime."
They had it all planned out.
As hunters, they'd have no trouble dealing with monsters that occasionally appeared.
Then they made an unexpected offer.
"Of course! Which brings us to this... We have one request."
"A request?"
"Yes. As you know, everyone on our team is wanted, so we can't enter the City Hall shop. We could take the Nightmare Coins out and sell them elsewhere, but we wouldn't get their full value."
Trading Nightmare Coins on the 13th floor was troublesome in itself.
Hunters were lurking around nearby too.
They couldn't attack during the day, no matter what.
But they could track you down and follow you at night.
"So we'd like you to handle the transaction for us in exchange for a fee."
"A fee? How much?"
"Including the cost of escorting us to the exit... 2,000 coins. What do you say? We earned this money thanks to you, of course, but..."
They nervously darted their eyes around as they watched my reaction.
2,000 coins.
Not bad.
They couldn't use the Direct Exit guarded by the city guards anyway.
I could've demanded more, but I didn't want to squeeze people who were about to retire.
"Let me discuss it with my team."
"Y-Yes!"
"... What do you think?"
They had already overheard everything, so there was no need to explain.
"Sounds fine. It's not like we're going to kill them now."
"If we get paid upfront, I don't see a problem."
"I don't object either."
Yuki naturally took my side, so I didn't really need to ask.
Still, I did out of courtesy.
"Yuki..."
"I agree too!"
In the end, we decided to go with them.
"All right, you can use this room. There isn't much of the night left anyway... Do you have food?"
"Unfortunately, no."
"We'll share some of ours."
"Thank you. Here's the advance payment."
They handed all their coins over to us.
We needed to use them to buy equipment from the shop anyway.
After receiving the fee upfront, our budget came to 12,500 coins.
We decided to keep some emergency funds and spend only 10,000 for now.
"That should be enough to buy artifacts, right?"
"By the way, what happened at that factory earlier?"
"That... it was incredibly suspicious."
I explained the factory to Sang Hajun and Han Juwon.
I had let it pass quickly because we were in a hurry at the time.
But thinking about it now, there were far too many suspicious things.
"What? They were producing residents in that factory?"
The textile factory seemed to have been built as a cover from the beginning.
It was large and noisy enough that it wouldn't seem strange for it to operate twenty-four hours a day.
Keeping the facility secret and producing residents with Nightmare Coins both made sense.
The facility would obviously become a target for hunters, and residents were constantly being consumed on the 13th floor.
"But... why don't they hunt the Nightmare Monsters themselves?"
The Night Watchers we'd seen earlier were quite powerful.
If they organized properly, dealing with Nightmare Monsters would be easy.
Did they create a structure that made enemies fight enemies because hunters were potential threats?
If that was intentional, it was clever...
Still, it was hard to understand.
The Orc hunters answered my question.
"Ah, that's because of infection."
"Infection?"
"When residents get near Nightmare Monsters, they start changing to resemble them. The Night Watchers are probably the same. The streetlights suppress it."
So it wasn't that they chose not to do it.
They couldn't.
That was why the Nightmare Zone still remained.
Nightmare Monsters seemed to keep appearing no matter how many times they were killed, like ordinary monsters.
Had they gathered around the enormous bait that was the city?
It seemed only the ones that occasionally came near the streetlights were hunted directly.
"..."
I recalled the entity in the abyss that I had sensed earlier.
There was no way the entire structure of the 13th floor was unrelated to it.
At the very least, it was definitely deeply connected to the streetlights.
It hadn't watched me for very long.
It was as if it were afraid of me looking back at it.
I didn't know what it was, but it was a cowardly bastard.
Cock-a-doodle-doo...
The sun rose as the conversation ended without reaching a clear conclusion.
We decided to move quickly.
"When will the closed exit reopen?"
"This was a major incident, but it should open before sunset."
"Good. I'll go shopping at City Hall, so you stay here."
"Understood."
I headed to City Hall with only Yuki and Kim Yuna.
Sang Hajun was in charge of surveillance from the rooftop.
The weather was clear, and the guards didn't seem to recognize us at all.
They were fairly tense, though.
As we walked toward the bounty board, Kim Yuna quietly grumbled.
"Team Leader, aren't you nervous at all?"
"We need to check properly. Ah, there it is."
The board had been updated.
First were the five escaped Orc hunters.
They even had proper photographs.
The bounty was 500 coins per person.
That was a completely different order of magnitude from the bounties on those petty-criminal Lizardmen last time.
Above that, in the best spot on the board, was us.
There were no photographs, of course.
It said: Three people who infiltrated the factory last night and their associates.
There was almost no witness information either, so I wondered if it could even be called a proper bounty.
"Wow... Our bounty is 1,000 coins per person."
"Team Leader, can we really go in right away? If we suddenly show up with 10,000 coins, won't they suspect us first?"
I had considered the same thing.
But I had already concluded that it would be fine.
"Don't worry. If things worked that way, the City Hall shop couldn't stay in business."
"... What do you mean?"
Instead of giving a long explanation, I entered the City Hall shop with her.
Ding!
"Welcome. What are you looking for?"
"Artifacts. Around 10,000 coins."
"..."
The clerk went inside with a stiff expression, and a manager came out shortly afterward.
"Welcome. May I confirm the payment first? As you know, this isn't a small amount..."
Clink.
When I set down a Subspace Backpack filled with coins, the manager quickly understood the situation.
Smiling, the manager showed us the merchandise.
"These are the finest artifacts our shop carries..."
Before the curtain over the special display case could fully open, guards rushed in from behind us.
They were clearly on high alert.
"Wait. Can you explain where that money came from?"
"I earned it through hard work."
When I gave a vague reply, the manager said to the guards, "Please leave. We're conducting business."
"No, there's a possibility that money was stolen from the factory yesterday..."
"So do the coins have serial numbers? Can you verify that?"
Nightmares dropped these coins in the first place, so naturally, they wouldn't.
The guards still didn't want to back down easily.
"The transaction can proceed after we complete verification..."
"You can't prove it. How are you going to verify anything?"
The manager's tone became sharper.
At a glance, their soul was far stronger than the guards'.
They handled expensive goods like these, so they must have held a more important position.
It was entirely logical for the manager to take my side.
What would happen if this deal fell through?
Setting aside an immediate fight, I wouldn't hand the Nightmare Coins over to City Hall.
I'd take them to the Black Market, or bring them out of the Tower altogether.
Nightmare Coins were ultimately the result of twisted souls solidifying.
You could think of them as a kind of Soul Crystal.
To make proper use of them, additional processing facilities like the furnace would be necessary.
But as a Death Priest, that wasn't particularly difficult for me.
Whether they ended up on the Black Market or outside the Tower, City Hall would fail to recover the coins.
So it was only natural for the manager to act this way.
"Can't you see I'm cleaning up your mess right now? Leave."
"..."
The guards finally withdrew reluctantly.
If they caused trouble trying to recover these coins now, other hunters would stop coming to the City Hall shop as well.
If their coin recovery rate dropped, they would be the ones who suffered.
"My apologies. Let me show you the merchandise again."
Rrrk.
The curtain over the special display case opened again.
Footnotes:
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
